Gloria Grady on 40 years dressing Canberra's fashion-savvy women

Styles, tastes, consumption habits, even physiques have changed. But one thing, at least, has remained constant: there will always be special occasions requiring a dress.

It’s a fact of life that has kept Gloria Grady in constant work since the late 1970s, coasting through the decades with her mouth full of pins, adjusting hemlines and draping silks. An old-school dressmaker, with a tiny, cluttered studio filled with piles of fabric, racks of dresses and stacks of photographs, Grady has been dressing women in Canberra for decades.

She has made more wedding dresses and evening gowns than she can count, but she also has clients who require entire wardrobes, or a suite of outfits for a race meet. Nothing surprises, fazes or stresses her out, particularly, not after 44 years.

But even after all this time, she can’t resist a beautiful fabric and a challenge, from panicking brides to diplomats requiring a year’s worth of clothes for an overseas posting.

Although she’s been based in Canberra since the 1980s, Grady has clients of all ages all over the place. Some have been coming back to her for years, and almost all of them have come to her via word of mouth.

“I like it like that, because people know what to expect,” she says.

She’s also known for her diplomacy; for every woman who comes to her studio clutching a photograph of a Hollywood starlet in a jaw-dropping Oscars gown, she will counter, gently, with an alternative suggestion. But she won’t send someone with an impossible dream away empty-handed.

“I don't say, ‘I'm not a plastic surgeon’, but at times you'd like to,” she says.

“People sometimes come to me for weddings and I think, this is going to look terrible. And so I say, ‘Go and try some things on and then we'll talk about it’. You don't want people to look awful.”

She developed an intuition for designing and making dresses at an early age, through watching her own mother do exactly what she does today.

Born in Mackay, Queensland, her parents were part of the first wave of Italian migrants - her mother arrived in 1924 at the age of two. Part of a big, rural Italian family, the Bulgarellis, she spent her high school years in boarding school in Brisbane, and went on to study law - for a short period - at the University of Queensland.

She didn’t finish the degree, and instead moved to Sydney, where did some finishing courses at the University of Melbourne. She and a friend set up a fashion business in South Yarra called Je - French for 'I'. It was the height of what she called “tat shops”, and designers cutting old dresses and swathes of lace. Je got on the bandwagon, but also starting supplying clothes for chain stores, and corporate designs for airlines and hotels.

Under the label Atlantic Ethel, they made the first uniforms for Parliament House, and for the airline Air Caledonie.

“We didn’t start out doing one-offs,” she says.

“But we used to supply shops all over Australia, and they would ask us to do one-offs for some of their clients, because we had clients who'd buy all our stuff.”

Grady eventually moved to Canberra - she had, by then, met her future husband, the artist and former gallery owner Ben Grady - and began working with the House of Merivale, the fashion boutique modelled on London’s Biba and owned by the Hemmes family. She ran the Canberra branch in Civic until it closed in the 1990s.

“Then I just decided I would just go back to doing clothing,” she says.

“My mother was a designer. I sort of grew up with it, never thinking I'd do it, because of all the deadlines.”

She first set up an atelier in Griffith, and in the intervening years moved between Fyshwick and Manuka, lately settled in a tiny workshop on Bougainville Street.

She began her own business by making clothes for other shops, but it was her one-off designs that eventually took over.

“I preferred that, because I didn't like chasing,” she says.

In the week of this interview, the 71-year-old is more flat-out than usual (a near-constant state) because of the wedding and racing season.

“We do a lot of Melbourne Cup stuff,” she says - “we” being herself and two staff.

"They're my Sydney clients - they go to all the meetings, because they own a lot of horses, and so we've got to make seven outfits, and coordinate them. For one event.”

Although the peak times coincide with distinct seasons - parties, awards, weddings, racing - she has cut back her workload in recent years, so that she can help her 37-year-old daughter Sybilla with her two sons.

“I've scaled back a lot, because I want to be available, and I don't want to work as hard as I did,” she says.

“But still, I have workers, and I've got to keep them working.”

Her clients - none of whom she will name - run the gamut of needing one-off wedding or formal gowns, to entire work wardrobes for corporate high-flyers. She even has a client - a very, very wealthy client - who regularly flies her to Sydney for fittings for her and her daughters.

“They go overseas, and they hire these wonderful places and bring their children and staff to look after the children and everything else,” Grady says.

“When she last went overseas, a few years ago, she bought a Valentino lace that was $4000 a metre. She was having a long dress, and it was extremely difficult.”

She maintains an uncomplicated process that involves taking measurements and creating a “calico” - a shape cut from simple calico that conforms to the client’s body, and from which almost anything can be made.

“Most people don't even approximate the shape of their parents, because other genetics come into it.

“I don't know if it's nutrition, I don't know what it is, but shapes have changed a lot. We find that girls have gotten squarer, generally, without the tiny little waist, but then we used to have to wear tight undergarments, so I think your body developed to that shape that you were wearing.”

Those who seek Grady out won’t arrive expecting to pay fast-fashion prices; she pays her staff in Australian wages, and thus has never bothered to compete with the international market. It’s a fact of life that she wishes she could impart to many fashion design graduates she has seen come through her shop, completing their practical assessment or doing internships.

The same goes for customers; she is often asked to adjust otherwise well-made garments that have been made overseas and purchased online.

But while it’s clear that a client should expect higher prices for a bespoke garment, she gives short shrift to the exorbitant amounts people will pay for wedding dresses.

“Stuff happens and people are vulnerable. I don't know what it is, people sometimes think if I spend this much, it's going to be fabulous. And it sometimes isn't," she says.

The most expensive dress she can ever remember making was around $18,000, but she says people seem to be “much more sensible these days”.

“You've got to be careful. Some of them are very grand and they can be gorgeous, but simplicity is always beautiful,” she says.

Although she has made countless wedding dresses in a vast array of styles, she maintains her favourite is the dead-simple silk sheath worn by Carolyn Bessette when she married John Kennedy Jr in 1996. She also - controversially, perhaps? - preferred Meghan Markle’s dress over Kate Middleton’s.

In fact, while she’ll make almost anything a client asks for - the customer is always right - her mantra when it comes to style could well boil down to one statement: for god’s sake, keep it simple.

And after 44 years, it’s safe to say she knows of what she speaks.